Anticlue

Should there be a right of IT Eminent Domain?

The principal I?m arriving at is shouldn?t there be a right of Eminent Domain for IT. Ultimately, isn?t the need for a business decision based upon a technology belong to the IT department? Should this fact need to be communicated? Or should it simply be understood?

What I?m attempting to drill down to is that over a period of time, technology has become more usable for the masses. The masses utilize it. This is a good thing. There are many new creative ideas on how to accomplish tasks at hand.

After a certain period of time, the lines become blurred as to who owns the right of eminent domain for technology. One trend that has been seen is having the CIO report to the CFO, therefore the ultimate decision point would be a CFO. Another trend is entrepreneurial individuals develop or utilize an open source tool to meet a business need. Normally these business needs are ones that IT hasn?t been resourced to meet. Finally there are the driven individuals, who do IT on a part-time basis or full time within a department, in a silo who need to manage their own technology. Also when conference occur, it ends up being the driven individuals who attend alone rather than with the IT department. In an organization that has two or maybe all three of these trends, how is a technology decision the responsibility of the IT department?

As IT support comes from disparate resources, an IT organization needs to clarify the right of eminent domain through the use of policies and procedures. Standards that combine with the business strategy of the organization and the level or risk propensity of the organization are the pathway to eminent domain. For example, customer support agreements with department clearly define the level of support being provided for that department from the IT organization. Technology standards, Security standards, Development standards, Architecture Standards, Usability standards and others define the policy of the organization. The policies need to be published, but they need to be processed and understood beforehand. Have the standards reviewed by the C-level management and understood the need and reasoning. Afterwards publish the standards to the organization and have an open comment period for the organization. Diligently review and work with the commenters, if any changes to the standards occur rereview with the C-level management. After this period publish the standards so they become the rule.

Comparison of Transaction and Decision Systems

For the customer who aspires to be a technical guru, sometimes the basics are not so basic. In a recent inherited project, I encountered an architectural design flaw in the system when it was about to be 70% completed. The issue at hand was that for decision reporting was being run against a transactional system. The reports were taking a long time to display to the customer, and the creation load was also causing issues with the transactional system. This issue was discovered in integrated testing the new system. So a clarification of the difference between a transactional and decision systems was needed, and a reworking of several key components of the project.

In a transactional system, the architectural structure is focused on data entry response time. The data is current, historical data should be archived. The data structure is at the detailed and granular level. The data organization is to perform quick queries, updates, and deletes upon a single record. Information is updated continuously through out the day.

In a Decision System, the architectural structure is focused on reporting response time. The data is historical information. The data structure is at a summarized, aggregate level. The data organization is to perform quick queries on numerous records at a time. Information is read-only, updated through a nightly extraction, transformation, and load from the transactional systems.

Far Cry CMS Overview

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Hello Again.

Things have been a pretty busy at work lately, new items that I can't wait to share.

I have had the opportunity to wrap my hands around an implementation of Crystal Enterprise 10. Along with attending the business objects conference in Dallas Texas at the Gaylord Texan. (if you ever have a chance to go, it is a beautiful place) So several entries on reporting for an enterprise will be cropping up in the future.

As for the blogging, I'm turning on comment approval. Hopefully, this will cut down on some of the spamming. I apologize for the inconvenience, but its ridiculous the amount of spamming.

Changes

Doing a little site redesign with the rainy weather today. So please ignore a couple of issues for the day.

You'll also notice that comments aren't working appropriately, way too much spam lately.